Enrage Aura still not worth using.

I really appreciate the devs trying to fix up this aura, but it is still largely unusable. It costs 5 DU but cannot effectively stop creatures (leaking ~20-30% of the mobs is not acceptable)... I'm not sure exactly what the intent is for this thing... but if the devs seem to think it has value, that value is so niche the community at large as yet to even discover it. Here is a simple suggestion that would go a long way for the entire Monk class.

Make it our ghetto wall.

* Make it 100% chance to enrage, but the number of units that can be enraged at any given time is what scales up.
* Change it so whenever a creature is enraged, it turns around and heads back towards its spawn, looking for enemies to fight.
* Keep it costing 5 or 6 DU.
* Make it lose more durability than it does now (so it works more like a normal wall that needs repairs/upkeep)

Here what will happen with this change: Monks will potentially be able to solo, but people will still prefer to use squire walls in group situations because of the much cheaper DU cost, which is good. The group-play is all about min/maxing your DU, but at least this aura would get play in some situations.

This is an interesting post, and I would like to see how a change like this would affect in-game use of this aura.

I have doubt Devs are gonna change it. I mean... Monk are more like melee support, not meant for walling. And it shouldn't be hard to pick off 1-3 mob that leaks out of enraged aura.

have you tried putting enrage aura near other defenses? its job is to basically stall movement and redirect attacks towards friendly units. Stick one before a wall with a bunch of ranged towers behind the wall and thing will get obliterated and your walls need less repairs

its basically every defense rolled into 1. Stops movement, does some damage, reduces damage you would take. obviously its job is not meant to specialize in any 1 thing

have you tried putting enrage aura near other defenses? its job is to basically stall movement and redirect attacks towards friendly units. Stick one before a wall with a bunch of ranged towers behind the wall and thing will get obliterated and your walls need less repairs

its basically every defense rolled into 1. Stops movement, does some damage, reduces damage you would take. obviously its job is not meant to specialize in any 1 thing

This is a great point too.

Like most jack-of-all trades, the Enrage aura tries to do everything and ultimately sucks at all of them.

Personally I'm in favor of trendy scrapping the whole aura and replacing it with a resistance-stripping aura. (Make said resistance stripping aura costly in DU and have a very low chance per tick to work, and suddenly you have a very potent tool that is unreliable without additional support.

Darkness Traps also need a massive revamp.

Enrage + Ensnare gives it more time to be successful and slows down the fire immune. Can be pretty amusing and grind many of them to a halt. The various snares of the game don't have to be 100% effective. If enemies are only trickling through, that means they are that much easier to deal with, and you can run around and slaughter each aura trap individually if need be with all the time they buy you. I do think it would be better if it was a bit less costly though, considering it usually needs help to reach its full potential.

There is one use it has that only one other thing in the game shares, and it's the more effective of the two. If you can snare two meaty enemies with Enrage, you can delay the wave ends on Insane and buy yourself much more time to repair and upgrade. It's one of those things that makes me think gearing a Monk to place temporary emergency auras as needed (and of course reserving the necessary 5 DU for it) would be helpful.

Fun story with enrage auras tonight!

I was playing on my low-level hero monk in endless spires, our team was a Hero Monk, Two Trap Huntresses, and a Hero Squire.

To slow the incoming mobs I put down a rage aura on each south bridge, then on the stairs we had snare+elec+infernos. At the top our squire had harpoons set up for wyverns.

The Monk and each huntress took an approach, and the squire roamed. Even without walls (or any points in any aura stats) the effect of the enrage aura was AMAZING, to say the least.

Pretty much the entire round a large group of mobs were fighting in the rages, letting the players in the south lanes storm into the group with piercing shot or monk melee (which is rather good against large groups of enemies since the DEFAULT animation AND the ninja animation hit in a 360 degree arc.) when they could, but freeing us up to kite and kill ogres at our leisure. Even the x3 ogre wave went very smoothly, since the bulk of the mobs in the lower area were too distracted hitting each other to do much (and the ones up top had a whole mess of traps melting them alive.)

What is even funnier? The rage auras never went down once, and I never had to repair them. Note this is with maybe +15 aura health from equipment.

This was on normal, but I have a newfound respect for rage aura now.

I find Rage aura to be very useful in environments where there are too many mobs for conventional defenses to handle.

Take monster fest, for example.

Step 1) Place Enrage aura at one of the chokes
Step 2) Go off and handle business in other areas
Step 3) Periodically come and clean the enrage aura out
Step 4) Profit

I find that, for whatever reason, Enrage auras very rarely need repairing.

They're the best distraction in the game. The damage mobs do to other mobs seems negligible... but it's free, and it's damage that isn't on you or your defenses, so what the heck?

I find Enrage Aura works best on its own, far away from other defenses (Mobs seem to get re-focused with other towers hitting them... I could be wrong though) with someone just going over to "clean it out" periodically.

They're good if you're running with a tower squire or tower mage, the mobs will be stuck in the aura fighting while being sniped by harpoon turrets/striker turrets

have you tried putting enrage aura near other defenses? its job is to basically stall movement and redirect attacks towards friendly units. Stick one before a wall with a bunch of ranged towers behind the wall and thing will get obliterated and your walls need less repairs

its basically every defense rolled into 1. Stops movement, does some damage, reduces damage you would take. obviously its job is not meant to specialize in any 1 thing

This is actually how I use it. It works incredibly well, sometimes better than slow aura and for longer. It's not meant to kill the mobs (sad but true). It's meant to keep them under control to kill them with something else.

You're right, enrage doesn't need to be repaired cuz it's always free. I usually leave enrage by itself (works ****ing awesome in a small choke or if you make it big enough radius), and then come back to clean the stuff up. ;)

I'm still trying to understand the aura myself.

From what I can tell it's fairly useful for stalling enemies. Though, once your monk gets around or upwards of level 60 and stats start to balloon it doesn't seem any more useful than a 'snare aura for the purpose of stalling. Furthermore, enemies don't do that much damage to each other so it really won't help you kill units any faster. This is a critical problem with the aura. There might be some very specific challenges where stalling some enemies and leaking most is attractive but I'm not sure what that situation would be. Most situations players want to maximize their DPS per defense unit and minimize the investment in blockade / crowd control. 5 defense units for a leaky, kind of slowing, minimal damaging red ball just doesn't mesh with the usual aim of tower builders.

What it needs is damage potential, either directly, or through synergy. My suggestion for a direct approach would be for confused enemies to hit targetted enemies for a minor % of health, modified by stats and tower upgrades on a diminishing return. The indirect approach would be that confused enemy strikes would make struck enemies vulnerable to physical damage. The aura would need a combination of both to matter.

I can just imagine the enrage aura over the squire blender.

Like most jack-of-all trades, the Enrage aura tries to do everything and ultimately sucks at all of them.

Personally I'm in favor of trendy scrapping the whole aura and replacing it with a resistance-stripping aura. (Make said resistance stripping aura costly in DU and have a very low chance per tick to work, and suddenly you have a very potent tool that is unreliable without additional support.

Darkness Traps also need a massive revamp.

Top end towers for all classes need revamping... =/

Enrage aura is the single most overpowered aura.. by quite a bit. you just have to know when to use it. It is viable CC and can take a fast map and slow it way way down.

Ogres are immune to it right?

Enrage vs ensnare
ensnare is much larger (ensnare better)
ensnare costs 2 DU less, thus 2 DU per lane (ensnare better)
ensnare slows for more as your tower damage increases, not sure what enrage does as tower damage increases (ensnare better probably)
ensnare doesn't work on psn immune, enrage doesn't work on fire immune (even)
enrage needs repair less often, but not by much (enrage better slightly)
enrage deals some minor damage (enrage better slightly)
ensnare works on ogres (ensnare better)

Looks like, aside from 2 slight benefits, ensare is much better.

I find a well placed Enrage Aura is invaluable on Nightmare Survival games.

My biggest problem with it is it's randomness. You can have every mob glued to it or not have one at all.

What I believe could make it awesome (besides reworking how it works) would be for it's code to be something like every third mob get's enraged, or every forth or whatever. And the more Tower atk you have, the faster the frequency is, for example:

At 0 Tower Atk > Every 5 mobs that pass it, 1 gets stuck.
At 200 Tower Atk > Every 4 mobs that pass it, 1 gets stuck.
At 500 Tower Atk > Every 3 mobs that pass it, 1 gets stuck.
At 1100 Tower Atk > Every 2.5 mobs that pass it, 1 gets stuck...

and so on...numbers are just an example and could change up or down, just so you get the idea.

Great Aura

This is a very underrated aura. It is indisposable on higher difficulty settings. It just has to be used correctly.

The enrage aura is very good for covering entrances where a player is not present. It is useless if you have a hunter killing all the spawns. But put an enrage aura there and it will keep the mobs occupied longer than a hunter gas trap. One player can cover three entries with enrage auras. Just go from entrance to entrance and clear them out.

Place it close to a large spawn point. The mobs will walk in and fight each other. Mobs behind the first group will get blocked in until they get into the aura then they will start beating each other too. This will even slow down an Ogre.

Do not place a slow aura on top of an enrage aura. It will just wear out the slow aura really fast. Instead, place your slow aura after the enrage aura. It will catch any fire immune mobs.

On Insane and Nightmare difficulty, the enrage aura will give you plenty of time to run around at the end of a wave and rebuild, repair and upgrade your defenses. When you are ready to move to the next wave, clean out the mobs.

Also, placing enrage auras near crystals in your base is very effective at dealing with spiders on Nightmare. They will beat on each other instead of webbing you and your defenses. One aura can usually cover two spider spawn points.

This aura is a MUST for the monster fests. It groups up the mobs and makes it very easy to clean them out all at once. One enrage near a spawn, + the standard slow and electric aura takes care of a spawn very efficiently. Someone just has to come by every 30 seconds or so to take out the trash.

Enrage is game changing for misty survival. Just saying.

What many people have been saying, it's effect is very noticeable in Misty.

Now if only I could manage to make it work in NM halloween.. -_-

In nigthmare ensare and enrage auras are the best, in fact drain, health and electric auras suck.

NM halloween is pretty easy, only time I use enrages is in misty survival.
One outside every spawn point then the usual towers, walls and ensnare near the crystals.
Just every so often run out and kill everything that's in the aura, holds ogres amazing well once the spawn numbers pick up.

My layout for NM Halloween:
http://forums.trendyent.com/showthread.php?39454-Request-NM-Halloween-Spooktacular!&p=317800&viewfull=1[[1113,hashtags]]

Try to put them close to the spawn point, and don't shrink them.
It's better with more enemies inside.